The steps towards offering a premium experience
Article Elevate is a work-in-progress redesign of CNN's core article experience aimed at improving readability, consistency, and recirculation. Built to support CNN's editorial voice across platforms, this evolving system emphasizes clarity, user engagement, and scalability. As part of an ongoing capstone project, this case study will continue to be updated with outcomes, testing insights, and implementation progress.
My Approach
Article Elevate is a collaborative effort initiated to bring greater structure and visual clarity to CNN's article templates. This approach, which centers on aligning user needs with editorial workflows, focuses on better typography, cleaner layouts, and thoughtful entry points into related content. While the system is still in refinement, early design explorations aim to create a more focused, less cluttered reading experience.
Vision and Innovation
The long-term vision for Article Elevate is to introduce a scalable, modular article system that adapts to different content types—from breaking news to evergreen explainers—without sacrificing editorial depth. Innovations like sticky utility bars, inline topic tagging, and component-based layouts are being explored to improve navigation, time on page, and content discovery.
Identifying Unique Challenges
One of the biggest challenges is balancing editorial flexibility and UX consistency. CNN publishes across a broad spectrum of content styles, and the system must account for visual hierarchy, SEO needs, ad placements, and platform-specific constraints. Elevate is designed to serve editorial teams and users without overcomplicating the publishing process.
Resolving Complex Problems
The article template had grown fragmented over time, often modified per vertical, region, or platform. Elevate aims to unify these templates into a shared design system that works across global teams and audiences. We're also addressing legacy technical debt and performance trade-offs by rethinking how reusable components interact with content, ads, and recommendation logic.
User-Centric Design
The reading experience is at the heart of this project. Every decision, from responsive typography to scroll behavior, has reader comfort and accessibility in mind. Content modules are designed to load predictively, reduce bounce rates, and encourage article-to-article navigation while keeping editorial content front and center.
Meeting User Needs
Today's users expect fast, informative, and visually digestible stories. Article Elevate is being designed to meet these expectations with a modern visual system, clear entry points into related content, and lightweight navigation tools. Accessibility, mobile performance, and content recirculation are top priorities throughout the redesign process.
Conclusion
This case study reflects the current state of a live, evolving project. Design explorations, usability insights, and engineering implementation are still underway. Future iterations will add more updates, including prototypes, metrics, and stakeholder feedback, keeping you informed and engaged in the process.
